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I reviewed the excellent, exhaustive Tangerine Dream boxset, In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973–1979, in a recent Uncut, and also spoke to synthesist and keyboard player Peter Baumann about those years. Here's a ...
UNCUT: There are some fantastic live sets here, the sound quality is amazing.
PETER BAUMANN: I remember we recorded all those on a little four-track machine! Very often we’d listen back to them – sometimes we’d think, ‘Ah, tonight wasn’t worth listening to!’ But we took it along to every concert.
Do you think Phaedra marked a big change?
It’s hard to say, because there was nothing to compare it to. We felt it was like a progression from Zeit and Atem. Those were released in Germany, and I don’t think Virgin ever got the rights to them. Certainly, Phaedra was a major step forward. The times had changed, the equipment we got had changed, and Richard Branson came to Germany and said, ‘Hey, I want to sign you!’ We were the second artist that Virgin released, after Mike Oldfield.
And, like Mike Oldfield, you sold a lot of records!
I remember I was with my girlfriend in Italy on vacation, and I got this telegram from Richard Branson saying, “Your record is in the Top 10, you’ve gotta come to London and do interviews.” I said, “What Top 10?” I mean, it never dawned on me that the record could actually ever be in charts. It was a big surprise.
Your equipment seemed to change for Phaedra…
With Phaedra, there were a couple of things. The Moog sequencer was critical, but we really used the Mellotron quite extensively, we had custom tapes made for that. I think we had three Mellotrons in all! For Phaedra especially, we really used outboard gear in the studio during the mixing, which was an integral part of the sound. We cranked up the tape delay and reverb and phasers and chained them together. The mixing session was really a part of the whole production process.
The tape delay seemed important, especially live, when everything was fed through it.
They were Revox tape recorders that we had customised so you could vary the speed on them, that was our main delay. We each had our own little mixing board and our own tape delay, so we were really three stations that could all make music and were all tied together to a main mixing board – three stereo outputs, basically.
You improvised both live and in the studio, didn’t you?
They were all improvised. That was part of the fun, and when it worked it really worked. Sometimes it didn’t work and it was less cool, but we took the chances. After having done maybe a dozen or two dozen concerts, some things that really worked well we started to repeat, intuitively – we’d have little themes, little sequences, that we’d reuse and then improvise out of that base.
How did you decide who would start a piece, and what instruments you’d use within one improvisation?
Usually we would decide on a key, and we’d start it with one note. There were some abstract sounds on top of that, and the sequencer would be introduced after a few minutes. The sequences were improvised, the sequencer had many different modes that you could change live, so there was never a completely predictable sequence that you’d play. None of us were conventionally great musicians, but the combination really came up with something quite unique for the time. We had instinctively unique contributions that we made – Christopher was a little bit more musical, he put more of the rhythm in as he used to be a drummer, Edgar would put in a lot of harmonies and I would put in most of the melodies and was involved in the mixing, the post-production. So we all had our slot within the group.
Ronnie Wood is the subject of a major new documentary, Somebody Up There Likes Me.
The film, directed by Mike Figgis, will premiere on October 12 at this year's London Film Festival. It covers both Wood's music career, from his upbringing in West London, through The Birds, The Jeff Beck Band and up...
Ronnie Wood is the subject of a major new documentary, Somebody Up There Likes Me.
The film, directed by Mike Figgis, will premiere on October 12 at this year’s London Film Festival. It covers both Wood’s music career, from his upbringing in West London, through The Birds, The Jeff Beck Band and up to the Stones – as well as his work as an artist.
“Who would have thought that a lad from Hillingdon would be able to combine all his hobbies and convert them into such diverse careers,” says Wood. “It’s such an incredible feeling to look back on my life and discuss key moments along the way that I remember vividly as if they were yesterday. I am flattered that so many talented people took the time to say such nice things about me!”
The film features interviews Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Rod Stewart.
“I was intrigued by Ronnie,” says Figgis. “The combination of his eclectic musical range and his love of painting seemed like a promising start to a documentary. I decided to jump in and we began talking, the first of a really interesting series of conversations. We covered so much ground in these talks and that led to interesting encounters with the likes of Damien Hirst and then a lovely music session in a studio. The remaining Stones chimed in with interesting stories and the result is the film. Ronnie Wood is a very interesting guy, so many personas.”
Neil Young & Crazy Horse have released a track for their new album, Colorado.
You can hear "Milky Way" below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_-9qcbuLcA
Colorado is Young's first album with the Horse since 2012's Psychedelic Pill and will be released by Reprise Records on October 25.
Colorado w...
Neil Young & Crazy Horse have released a track for their new album, Colorado.
You can hear “Milky Way” below.
Colorado is Young’s first album with the Horse since 2012’s Psychedelic Pill and will be released by Reprise Records on October 25.
Colorado was recorded mostly live in the studio in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and was produced by Young and John Hanlon with additional mixing at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu.
The album will be available on high resolution digital audio through Neil Young Archives, and on a three-sided, double vinyl album packaged with a bonus 7” vinyl single. The bonus single contains two non-album tracks: “Rainbow Of Colors”, which was recorded live by Neil Young solo; and “Truth Kills”, a studio track by Young with Crazy Horse.
Colorado will also be available on CD and digitally at all streaming and digital outlets. It’s now available to pre-order by clicking here, with “Milky Way” provided as an instant download.
Pink Floyd have announced details of The Later Years box set.
A 16-disc collection of materials from 1987 onwards, it includes over six hours of previously unheard audio and over seven hours of previously unseen audiovisuals alongside other late Floydian goodies.
The key elements are:
* A Momenta...
Pink Floyd have announced details of The Later Years box set.
A 16-disc collection of materials from 1987 onwards, it includes over six hours of previously unheard audio and over seven hours of previously unseen audiovisuals alongside other late Floydian goodies.
The key elements are:
* A Momentary Lapse Of Reason updated and re-mixed by David Gilmour and Andy Jackson
* Over six hours of previously unheard audio and over seven hours of previously unseen audiovisuals from A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, The Division Bell and The Endless River albums
* Full unreleased audio and remastered films from 1989’s Venice concert and 1990’s special Knebworth concert: unseen for decades
Unearthed footage of Pulse rehearsals and full-length Ian Emes film of The Endless River
* First ever release of Pink Floyd’s last live performance with David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright together at the 2007 Syd Barrett Tribute Concert included on Blu-ray, DVD and 7” vinyl
* New 5.1 mixes, first ever Blu-ray releases and unique 7” singles included
* Memorabilia including replica tour programmes, a lyric book and a 60-page photo book
*2-LP / 1CD highlights package also to be released
CD 1
A Momentary Lapse Of Reason updated & remixed
CD 2 & 3
Delicate Sound Of Thunder remixed
CD 4
Live Recordings, 1987 & 1994 unreleased studio recordings
CD 5
Knebworth Concert 1990
Blu-ray 1
Surround & Hi-res audio mixes
Blu-ray 2
Delicate Sound Of Thunder restored & remixed
Blu-ray 3
Pulse restored & re-edited
Blu-ray 4
Venice concert 1989 & Knebworth concert 1990
Blu-ray 5
Unreleased live films music videos & concert screen films
Blu-ray 6
Documentaries & unreleased material
2 x 7” vinyl singles in brand-new picture sleeves, featuring “Arnold Layne” performed live by Pink Floyd at the Syd Barrett Tribute concert, 2007 and “Lost For Words” from the Pulse tour rehearsals at Earl’s Court
60-page hard backed book of photos designed by Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon of StormStudios, including many previously unseen images.
A newly-created set of reproduction tour programmes (Pink Floyd World Tour 1987/1988, Pink Floyd Live 1989, Pink Floyd European Tour 1994), plus a brand new Lyrics Book, designed by Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon of StormStudios.
A collection of reproduction memorabilia including tour passes, stickers and posters, all printed to replicate the originals, and contained in a prestige card envelope.
Neal Casal has died aged 50.
News that the guitarist – who recorded and performed with acts including Ryan Adams And The Cardinals, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and Circles Around The Sun – had passed away was shared (August 27) via the musician’s Twitter account.
“It’s with great sadness...
Neal Casal has died aged 50.
News that the guitarist – who recorded and performed with acts including Ryan Adams And The Cardinals, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and Circles Around The Sun – had passed away was shared (August 27) via the musician’s Twitter account.
“It’s with great sadness that we tell you Neal Casal has passed. As so many know, Neal was a gentle, soulful human who lived life through artistry & kindness. His family, friends & fans will always remember the light that he brought to the world. Rest easy Neal, we love you,” the statement reads.
It’s with great sadness that we tell you Neal Casal has passed. As so many know, Neal was a gentle, soulful human who lived life through artistry & kindness. His family, friends & fans will always remember the light that he brought to the world. Rest easy Neal, we love you. pic.twitter.com/Q0ap7jrkUC
Casal began his career in the late 1980s playing in Florida rock band, Blackfoot. After his debut solo album, 1995’s Fade Away Diamond Time, Casal embarked on a wide-ranging career including several more solo LPs.
Long-term Uncut readers will remember Casal’s “Today I’m Gonna Bleed”, which appeared on our first Sounds Of The New West compilation in 1998.
Casal also performed with the Cardinals from 2005 until 2009, where he played on on releases by Ryan Adams and Willie Nelson.
Adams is among those who paid tribute to Casal, writing that his “heart is broken”.
“Oh man. My heart is broken What an honor to have known you, true believer. I love you,” Adams wrote.
Oh man. My heart is broken What an honor to have known you, true believer. I love you. Go easy “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”#RIPNealCasalpic.twitter.com/4vlj3l2EoU
Bob Weir shared a photograph of him and Casal – presumably taken Saturday at Virginia’s Lockn’ Festival, where Weir and his late friend shared the stage – with the caption, “My last memory of Neal will be the smile he left me with.”
“I can’t believe I’m having to say goodbye to my friend and my brother,” Chris Robinson wrote in a statement. “It’s almost too painful. When I think about the songs we’ve written, the shows we’ve played and all the laughs and great times we shared, it’s almost unbearable to know you’re gone.”
Neal Casal was among the very best at what he did and I am very sad to hear that he's gone. Thanks for making the world better for a little while, Neal.
RIP Neal Casal. He was very kind to me by letting me open up circles around the sun gigs. We ate a whole bag of tortilla chips together after one show and talked about Derek Bailey. What a sweet dude and pal.
I am absolutely devastated with the news of the loss of my dear friend and consistent collaborator @nealcasal – he was always my favorite picker in LA and we’d all just finished some beautiful music together. I’m… https://t.co/e3i93mG7oM
A few years ago, some of you will remember, we ran a new series of specials under the A Life In Pictures aegis. This month, we've chosen to revisit Life In Pictures as a means of celebrating the extraordinary, colourful life and career of an artist who appears to have been tailor-made for such a str...
A few years ago, some of you will remember, we ran a new series of specials under the A Life In Pictures aegis. This month, we’ve chosen to revisit Life In Pictures as a means of celebrating the extraordinary, colourful life and career of an artist who appears to have been tailor-made for such a striking visual accompaniment. Behold! The glasses, the costumes, the sheer maximalist splendor of Elton John in all his many, wonderful guises – from Troubador balladeer and beyond. The Elton: A Life In Pictures is in the shops now and you can also buy a copy from our online store. Here’s John Robinson, our one shots editor, to tell you more about it.
I should quickly mention we have a marvellous new issue of Uncut out – Patti Smith on the cover – which you can buy in the shops or direct from our friends here. Free P&P in the UK, I should mention, too.
Elton: A Life In Pictures is a lavish 100 page tribute to pop’s most enduringly outrageous performer, saluting the 50 plus years he has spent as the lord of the keyboard.
What a life – and what pictures! The team behind Uncut’s long-running Ultimate Music Guides have brought their passion and expertise to this deluxe new product, which uses classic and rare photographs to fully chronicle Elton’s extraordinary musical journey.
With rare shots of his first band, to his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road farewell tour, via glam rock, massive ballads (and bigger shoes!), this is a life that can be vividly seen as well as heard. Thanks to the man’s great candour in interviews, we’ve been able to extract entertaining comment from the archives of NME, Melody Maker and Uncut to accompany each one.
With his dues paid, Elton’s rise was rapid, and his enjoyment of his fame enormous. Here you’ll find handsome documents of the many career high points – the Troubadour, 1970; Dodgers Stadium, 1975 – that we’ve since seen dramatized in his biopic Rocketman. You’ll also find a window into Elton’s celebrity life: his pals, the parties, the costumes.
Electric boots and a mohair suit – we’ve got those and all the rest. You can read it in our magazine…
Here's Elvis Costello's Album By Album feature from Take 260 [January 2019], which the man himself wrote for us...
“With stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas,” Elvis Costello tells Uncut, discussing his 1981 LP Trust. The...
Here’s Elvis Costello’s Album By Album feature from Take 260 [January 2019], which the man himself wrote for us…
“With stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas,” Elvis Costello tells Uncut, discussing his 1981 LP Trust. The new-wave upstart turned renaissance man could almost be describing any of his albums, though; from the audacious mix of fury and classicism on 1977 debut My Aim Is True, and the extravagant, Beatles-esque Imperial Bedroom (1982), to the sombre torch songs of 2003’s North and his eclectic, impressive latest, Look Now, Costello has aimed high and invariably succeeded.
When Uncut invited the songwriter to discuss nine of his finest albums, Costello suggested that he instead write his own reflections on some of his personal favourites with the Attractions, the Imposters, The Roots and solo – plus a fond look back at the demos he recorded with Paul McCartney, only released in 2017. Here, then, is Costello’s own personal history.On completing his ‘classic’, he says he left the NYC studio at 1am “thinking this was a movie that will probably never get made again”….
ELVIS COSTELLO
MY AIM IS TRUE
STIFF, 1977 Costello’s first recordings were so striking, Stiff signed their songwriter as an artist in his own right
ELVIS COSTELLO: Rehearsed in a rat-infested country house and recorded in a cardboard box in Islington [Pathway Studios] in a total of 24 hours’ studio time, on sick days and holidays from my office job as a computer operator. Having only heard my voice, mumbling under a bare bulb, club stage or on a borrowed reel-to-reel in my bedroom, I never imagined I would be in that studio with a band as good as Clover, a Marin County outfit whose Fantasy albums I’d had to hunt down in secondhand shops. They spoke in code about the songs – “Red Shoes” was “The One That Sounds Like The Byrds”. I didn’t mention that “Waiting For The End Of The World” was supposed to sound like “I’m Waiting For The Man”. I don’t think they had ever heard The Velvet Underground, and perhaps that was for the best. You can listen to a new take on “Mr Moon” from Clover’s recent Homestead Redemption (on which they revisit their ’70s songs and I deputise for vocalist Alex Call on an alternate take) and hear John McFee quote his own guitar part from “Alison”. Time is going backwards. I liked the sound of Pathway so much that I went back there with just me and Pete Thomas to cut “Kinder Murder” for Brutal Youth, and The Gwendolyn Letters, demos of the 12 songs that I wrote for Wendy James over one weekend in the ’90s.
ELVIS COSTELLO
THIS YEAR’S MODEL
RADAR, 1978 His second album, featuring “Pump It Up” and “Night Rally”, remains one of Costello’s best
Before we left Pathway, Nick Lowe had showed me that we could paint pictures with sound on “Watching The Detectives”. Steve Nieve had arrived by then to play the keyboards. I told him I wanted the piano to sound like “Hitchcock”, when I think I meant “Bernard Herrmann”. However, I needed all of the Attractions to work at speed of life for “Lipstick Vogue”. “Pump It Up” was scrawled on a hotel fire-escape in Newcastle, in the last days of the Stiff Tour, and cut at Eden Studios in Acton just before I left for our first American misadventure. You could say “we never looked back”, but having crossed the United States for the first time and been thrown off SNL and had a mince pie, when we returned home, we finished the album in the rest of the 11 days that we could afford. And then we went back to America, again and again… Look Now co-producer Sebastian Krys pushed up the faders on “This Year’s Girl” recently, adding the voice of Natalie Berman (from Wilde Belle) for a remix for the opening titles of the second season of The Deuce. These are very big shoes to fill after Curtis Mayfield’s “If There’s A Hell Below” had opened Season One, but Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas and Steve Nieve’s playing sounded as mighty as ever and we even uncovered an unused background vocal idea, lifted from our inspiration – The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath.
ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS
TRUST
F-BEAT/COLUMBIA, 1981 Recorded at a troubled time, Costello’s fifth took aim at his pop contemporaries
Every one of the 45rpm records that we issued between late 1977 and mid-1980 made some kind of showing on the UK hit parade. My face was suddenly on the cover of teen magazines, as unlikely as that may sound now. It’s a sad and predictable story that too much attention can turn a young man’s head. I thought myself above all temptations but wrote a lot of songs about the debris that surrounds them and anything else that flew by my window. That’s what filled Armed Forces and Get Happy!!. After some hits, some inexplicable catastrophes and producing The Specials under a laundromat in the Fulham Palace Road, I felt like driving the car into a ditch or at least to Sunderland, so, with stupefying arrogance, we set about showing our contemporaries what could be done with their winning formulas. “Clubland” was supposed to be “Message In A Bottle” with a middle eight, “You’ll Never Be A Man” was “Brass In Pocket” with more chords and some ideas hijacked from The “Detroit” Spinners, while “White Knuckles” was like hearing several XTC songs through a haze of scrumpy, gin and sherbet dabs. I doubt any of them were better songs than their models, but it was a lark. I wish I could say it kept us out of trouble. Somewhere along the way the Attractions managed to cut what I think of as their most original ensemble performance, “New Lace Sleeves”. Around this time, my publisher told me the song I’d just written on a newly purchased piano reminded him of something by Erik Satie, so I went to a music shop to find out what he was talking about and discovered that I could actually play the opening bars of a few of his deceptively simple piano pieces. However, I absolutely needed Steve Nieve’s fingers to make sense and music out of my sketch for “Shot With His Own Gun” and then I straightened up long enough to co-produce Squeeze’s East Side Story.
ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS
IMPERIAL BEDROOM
F-BEAT/COLUMBIA, 1982 Eager to embrace a variety of styles, Costello enlisted Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick
It was very sad to read of the recent passing of that incredibly talented, gentle man, Geoff Emerick. He patiently watched us burn off the “nervous energy” that had fuelled all our previous records until we found our way to this album. He’d seen better bands than us come into the studio with crazed notions and fuzzy fragments of song and put them into sonic order. We had set up at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Regent Street, in AIR Studios. If we thought we were being like The Beatles by hiring a harpsichord, then an actual Beatle was down the hallway making Tug Of War with George Martin, just past a mixing suite that hosted both The Jam and Alice Cooper, although, sadly, not at the same time. We gave ourselves an extravagant amount of weeks to make our best mistakes. Geoff Emerick’s recording experience and mixing made absolute sense of the band’s unpredictable but brilliant playing – Pete Thomas’s insane drumming on “Beyond Belief”, to Nieve’s demented piano on “Man Out Of Time” and “The Loved Ones” and Bruce Thomas’s mighty bass coda for “Shabby Doll”. Geoff sat through my endless vocal-group overdubs that were the first thing to get lost when we took the songs on the road as not one of the band could do much more than shout “Hey” on the chorus, so it took until last summer’s Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers Tour for Davey Faragher, Kitten Kuroi and Briana Lee to make some sense of my, sometimes, nonsensical notions. The record is occasionally called “baroque” – another of those overused French words, like “genre”, that make “critical thinking” seem like thinking – but this could really only be applied to Steve Nieve’s insanely funny and extravagant orchestration for “…And In Every Home” or that damn harpsichord on “You Little Fool”. I don’t think it has anything to do with “Almost Blue”, a song later heartbreakingly performed by Chet Baker, who had inspired me to write it, two years before he brought his beautiful trumpet playing to our rendition of “Shipbuilding”.
THE COSTELLO SHOW FEATURING THE ATTRACTIONS AND CONFEDERATES
KING OF AMERICA
F-BEAT/COLUMBIA, 1986
ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS
BLOOD & CHOCOLATE
DEMON/COLUMBIA, 1986 Two very different albums – one produced by T-Bone Burnett, the other by old compadre Nick Lowe
Producer T-Bone Burnett and I originally plotted this to be a half-acoustic and half-electric album. The first Hollywood sessions with players from Elvis Presley’s TCB band, jazz bassist Ray Brown and Earl Palmer – the drummer on both “Tutti Frutti” and “The Theme From The Flintstones” – gave us more than we bargained for, including “Indoor Fireworks”, “Poisoned Rose” and “I’ll Wear It Proudly”. Suspicion and ill-feeling replaced any literal or figurative electricity on the Attractions recording dates, apart from their superb contribution to “Suit Of Lights”. A matter of months later I booked Olympic Studios to finish the amplified half of the job in Barnes, and called Nick Lowe to produce, referee and play the acoustic rhythm guitar that holds together a record on which I frankly only make a noise with a Fender Telecaster. We set up with stage monitors, so everything was a roaring, muddy blur whether we were hammering through “Tokyo Storming Warning” or creeping through “I Want You”. If something was too loud in the mix, we simply turned off that channel and balanced to the bleed – appropriate, given the final title of the album. As to the chocolate, I think we ate it all.
PAUL McCARTNEY
FLOWERS IN THE DIRT DELUXE EDITION
CAPITOL/UME/MPL, 2017 An extra disc with this reissue features the lost demos recorded by the Beatle and Costello
Between 1987 and 1991, I wrote 15 songs with Paul McCartney, nine of which were released over five of our solo albums. We had started out to co-produce our co-written songs for Paul’s album Flowers In The Dirt but disagreed about the scope of the recording. I wanted Paul to have everything stripped to the boards, while I was secretly plotting my own album, Spike, on the scale of a Cecil B DeMille epic. Last year, a lavish reissue saw the official release of our two-man demos, recorded in the joyful moments after each composition was completed, in a room above Paul’s Hog Hill Studios. We got to harmonise and compete over the best lines in “You Want Her Too”, “So Like Candy” and the unreleased “Tommy’s Coming Home Again”. For me the highlight was the demo of “The Lovers That Never Were”, one of the greatest vocal performances of Paul’s solo career.
ELVIS COSTELLO
NORTH
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON, 2003 A stark album of jazzy ballads that contemplated a new relationship – chosen by Costello as his ‘classic’
I know this one divided listeners, who were led to believe that it was something to do with an empty martini glass or a dissolute man in an undone bow-tie, while, at the time, I believed that I had written a cracking folio of lieder, only not in German. Actually, I wrote these songs in the dead of night and cut some of them three times over, screwing up and throwing away the drafts, as befits an intense and mortifying farewell note that turns into a love letter. I began by recording all the songs in one long, flawed demo take, including numbers I would never sing again and some which were almost improvised, at jazz virtuoso Errol Garner’s old Steinway, a beast I could barely wrestle into submission. It’s a thin line between being truthful and burdening your friends with a private sorrow, but then my model for confession had always been a wooden box in church. Even an unassailable record like Joni Mitchell’s Blue admits the brightness of “California” and Bob Dylan’s originally released draft of Blood On The Tracks had all that reverb on the voice to chase away the pain. So I listened to my elders and betters, buried raw songs like “In Another Room” until a daytrip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, five years later and chose to travel from the darkness to the light. The Imposters rhythm section proved to be the wrong hammer for the job and quickly departed, but not before we recorded a gem called “Impatience” with Marc Ribot on a Cuban tres, a flourish of pizzicato strings and a horn section drawn from my pals in The Jazz Passengers. Steve Nieve was eventually joined by acoustic bassist Mike Formanek and drummer Peter Erskine, who played with the hushed and steady flow that the songs demanded. I wrote for a low group of woodwinds and brass around my baritone range and brought in a body of strings here and there, so the room was not entirely in black and white. In the very late ’40s and early ’50s, my mother used to smuggle jazz records into Liverpool via seafaring pals for fanatical customers who had read about the music of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz but couldn’t afford to hear it due to import duty on American records. Lee added his alto saxophone to the end of “Someone Took The Words Away”, so after the session I had him sign the sheet music to my Mam. Obliging, in his terse style, he wrote, “Lillian, Thanks. Lee”. Returning to Errol’s big machine at Nola Studios, I cut “I’m In The Mood Again”, which I finished at 1am. Then I walked outside onto 57th Street, thinking this was a movie that will probably never get made again.
ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ROOTS
WISE UP GHOST
BLUE NOTE, 2013 A strong set of new songs made in collaboration with Jimmy Fallon- soundtracking hip-hop troupe
Having told myself (and anyone else who’d listen) that I was happy to take my songs directly to the stage, I was taken willing hostage to a scheme by Questlove and engineer Steven Mandel to keep me in a Tardis-like cupboard at NBC until we made a record together. At the turn of the century, in what seemed like the last game of musical chairs, I was briefly signed to Deutsche Grammophon and Def Jam-Island at the same time, then to the Nashville quasi-independent Lost Highway, then to Verve Records for our trip to New Orleans to complete The River In Reverse with Allen Toussaint. Now we were working without a label or a budget, building tracks up from Questlove’s beats, Mandel’s samples of “Can You Be True?” from North or “Radio Silence” from When I Was Cruel, and slices from our own rehearsal jams on songs as widely spaced in time as “High Fidelity” and “Stations Of the Cross”. Those broadcast references were fitting, as the words were initially cut-ups of my own lyrics, written in reaction to events on a news-ticker, 25 years long, from “Pills And Soap” and “Invasion Hit Parade” to “Bedlam” and “The River In Reverse”. “Say something once, why say it again?” as David Byrne once proposed, to which I would reply, “Say something twice, maybe you’ll hear it this time.” So “Cinco Minutos Con Vos” viewed the same events as “Shipbuilding”, only from another hemisphere, and among these outward-bound views – in the last days before we delivered the record to Blue Note – Quest went back into that little cupboard with Ray Angry and Pino Palladino to cut the music for “The Puppet Has Cut His Strings”, a deeply upsetting series of images about my father’s last breath, which I could only let myself utter in the company of new friends.
ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS
LOOK NOW
CONCORD, 2018 One of Elvis’s finest of this century, a chamber-pop treat featuring Burt Bacharach and Carole King
So here we are, who we are and there you go… This is our latest waxing. All the Imposters parts and the vocal group arrangements for “Mr & Mrs Hush”, “Unwanted Wanted Number”, “Suspect My Tears” and the Carole King co-write, “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter”, were recorded in the Los Angeles studios where I’d cut King Of America, Spike, Mighty Like A Rose and Painted From Memory. I already had all of the string and horn arrangements in my head when we began the sessions, but put these ideas on the page so they could be added at Electric Lady in New York City. Then we returned to Vancouver to record my vocals. The opening song is “Under Lime”, which tells of the immoral dilemma facing ‘Jimmie’ – a late-’30s musical turn who I left “Standing In The Rain” on National Ransom: “It’s a long way down from the high horse you’re on when you stumble and then you’re thrown…” Burt Bacharach came in to lead the Imposters from the piano on “Don’t Look Now” and “Photographs Can Lie”, just two of the 20 or more songs that we’ve written in the last decade. Another tune for which Burt solved the musical puzzle is “He’s Given Me Things”, which closes with the lines: “He’s given me things you never dreamed of/Where dreams are dashed and trash is praised/He has an awful lot of money/The past can be bought and then erased…”
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Originally published in Uncut's Take 157
It started out as a trenchant political protest song by two white South African folkies, a song that drew parallels between the oppression of black South Africans and...
It started out as a trenchant political protest song by two white South African folkies, a song that drew parallels between the oppression of black South Africans and the genocide of Native Americans. It ended up in the hands of a bunch of fried Scallies and a south London wide-boy producer who turned it into an Ecstasy-soaked dance classic, the acme of early-’90s Madchester.
The Happy Mondays, who recorded it just as they were on the verge of being the biggest band in Britain, didn’t even want to do it at the time, but ended up having their arms gently twisted by their late, great mentor Tony Wilson. In the end everyone was seduced by the track, one that kicked off with an Italo-house piano fanfare, a thunderous funk shuffle, an incendiary guitar riff and Shaun Ryder’s random exhortations to “call the cops”. And it set the tone for their following LP, Pills’N’Thrills And Bellyaches.
Even the lyrical observations – about how the oppressor “can make you forget you’re a man” – became retooled for the ’90s dancefloor. Instead of being about the dehumanising effect of racism, it morphed into a reflection of the way in which psychotropic drugs can break down divides of race, gender and sexuality. As Shaun Ryder observed: “I suppose it’s about how Ecstasy made the white man dance, innit?”
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SHAUN RYDER (vocals): The initial thing was that Elektra, our record company in America, wanted us to do a cover version of a song by an Elektra recording artist for this fucking tribute album they were putting together, to commemorate 40 years of their label. They sent us a shit load of tunes on tape. “Tokoloshe Man” was the first one and “Step On” was the second. I don’t think we got past those two. At first we just said, “Fuck off, no, we’re not doing it, we don’t do covers. We haven’t got time ’cos we’re writing our own gear.” But Tony [Wilson] was saying, “Hey lads, let’s just do it, it’ll keep us nice with the American label.” He said it wasn’t going to be coming out in England, just on a compilation in America.
GAZ WHELAN (drums): It wasn’t our idea, it was Tony Wilson who convinced us. We all got given Omega watches from Elektra, who were being nice to us. The initial idea was that we did “Tokoloshe Man”. That was quite easy, it was a tribal riff, based around a single chord. After we did it, Tony suggested we do “Step On”, as it was next on the tape of suggestions Elektra gave us. So we played it in the studio once, and it seemed like a good idea.
JOHN KONGOS (co-writer): These were two big hits I had in 1971. They were co-written with a fellow South African called Chris Demetriou, my musical partner for many years. Me and Chris moved to London together in around 1967, but Chris had written the lyrics for “He’s Gonna Step On You Again” when we were living in South Africa. It started out as a protest song about the political situation under apartheid, and it was drawing connections between that and the abuse of the Native Americans. So we had that Native American theme running through it, those drums, the lyrics and that strong guitar riff. The lyrics are still very political.
Something of a survivalist drive has sustained Sleater-Kinney over their 25 years as a band. Together, Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss have braved the hardships of their early days in Olympia, Washington, as well as the inevitable stresses of growing fame in the 2000s. They even weat...
Something of a survivalist drive has sustained Sleater-Kinney over their 25 years as a band. Together, Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss have braved the hardships of their early days in Olympia, Washington, as well as the inevitable stresses of growing fame in the 2000s. They even weathered a decade apart, returning triumphantly in 2015 with No Cities To Love, which showed that, despite approaching an age at which it’s often judged unseemly for women to still be making rock music and with multiple successful parallel careers, Sleater-Kinney had lost none of their focus, nor any of their righteous, feminist post-punk energy.
The Center Won’t Hold, however, is far from the comfortable victory lap they might otherwise deserve. “The band is heading in a new direction,” wrote drummer Janet Weiss on Twitter at the start of July, “and it is time for me to move on.” “We are saddened by Janet’s decision to leave Sleater-Kinney,” countered her former bandmates. “It has been an incredible privilege to work with such a talented musician and drummer over the course of so many albums, including The Center Won’t Hold.” So just what is it about the “new direction” of their ninth album that has apparently alienated Weiss?
In its message at least, the new record is furiously, vitally Sleater-Kinney: Corin Tucker has called it “a power grab”, while Carrie Brownstein describes it as “an unabashed expression of existence”, with the band taking a stand at a time when threats to women’s freedoms in the west are, at both micro and macro levels, becoming ever more overt, organised and persistent.
But in its sound, sizeable changes have occurred. Firstly, there was a new MO enforced by simple geography: when Brownstein and Tucker started work on the new songs, the former was living in LA, Tucker in Portland, Oregon, so instead of playing together and talking ideas over in the same room as usual, they each worked at home on demos, writing on synthesiser and keyboard – in itself a change – and exchanging sound files. It was a process Brownstein describes to Uncut as “telling stories and sending the next chapter back. Corin would send something, so I would think, ‘OK, what’s another version of the story?’ So it felt novelistic in that way, or even like a series of short stories. And I think that’s where a lot of the different sounds came from – that allowance of someone else’s vision to hopefully take hold before we’d even finished writing the song.”
Sleater-Kinney then took those demos into the studio in July of last year with producer Annie Clark, aka electro-avant-pop maximalist St Vincent. It’s proved a controversial appointment and The Center Won’t Hold certainly features Clark’s fingerprints across its 33 minutes: there are more major keys, heightened dynamics and newly prominent synths and keyboards that mine novel seams of distortion, notably blown-out low-end frequencies. These are used most strikingly on the panoramic “Ruins”, the boldly overdriven “Bad Dance” and the title track, whose metallic buzz reflects the urgent mood that looms over the whole set. These may be fresh textural settings for S-K, but they’re still very much in step with the band’s take on drama, common to their whole catalogue. And while much has been made of the hiring of St Vincent, she came in as a longtime fan of the band – covering “Modern Girl” early last year, in fact. S-K themselves are hardly allergic to ’80s pop, either, with No Cities To Love’s title track and “Hey Darling” demonstrating that they’ve inherited as much from The B-52s and Pat Benatar as from Patti Smith and Poly Styrene.
As Brownstein tells it, three songs are presented as “poke holes” into the album: the title track, with its restrained first half later submerged by riotous punk fuzz; “Ruins”, where Tucker’s lyrics summon a metaphorical monster of our own making (“You’re a creature of sorrow, you’re the beast we made/You scratch at our sadness until we’re broken and frayed,” she states in her magnificent, throaty contralto); and “Hurry On Home”, a spiky comment on issues around compliance and amenability in relationships in which Brownstein’s declaration – “You know I’m unfuckable, unlovable, unlistenable, unwatchable” – speaks to the internalised fear of Everywoman and is carried by a high-stepping, punk-pop melody, a disco beat and a new digital crispness. “We thought, ‘This is the album’,” she says. “It’s scary, it’s vulnerable, it’s personal but it’s character-based at times, but also unmasked.”
Self-exposure and truth-telling – each as much political act as human connector – have always been central to S-K’s ethos, and The Center Won’t Hold is no different. It emerged from the fallout of the 2016 US presidential election, with the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of our new world (dis)order. Friendship and music provide solace for the trio on “The Future Is Here” (“I need you more than I ever have because the future’s here and we can’t go back”) and “Reach Out”, a triumphantly roaring power ballad that finds Tucker announcing, in what might be interpreted as a prediction of Weiss’ departure, “I can’t fight without you, my friend…” “Broken” is its polar opposite: the album’s final track, written by Brownstein on piano and with a melody sung by Tucker, it applies a melancholic, supper-club lustre to its homage to Christine Blasey Ford and all the other women who’ve spoken out publicly against their sexual aggressors: “She, she, she stood up for us when she testified/Me, me too, my body cried out/When she spoke those lines.” It’s an artfully powerful song, but it’s not inconceivable that one of rock’s most fluid and wild drummers might have been slightly put out by this new style. Similarly, the doo-wop-influenced disco of “Can I Go On” finds little room for Weiss’s freewheeling talents.
It’s the joyously defiant and hopeful “LOVE” and “Bad Dance” that are the album’s existential axis, however. In the former, Brownstein recaps the story of S-K’s genesis in her friendship with Tucker and her own rescue by music as a young girl who “came up in the void” outside Seattle. “Heard you in my headphones, slipped you my address/Call the doctor, dig me out of this mess/ Tuned it down to C, turned the amps to 10/A basement of our own, a mission to begin,” she sings to a cheerful new-wave tempo, referencing S-K’s second and third albums. Brownstein then turns her attention to society’s expectation that women over 40 take up less space – diminishing themselves physically and muting their expression – and surrender the rock music game to a younger gang: “Done with being told that this should be the end/Fighting is the fuel and anger is a friend/There’s nothing more frightening and nothin’ more obscene/Than a well-worn body demanding to be seen.” In the swaggering “Bad Dance”, we’re commanded by Brownstein to “be the weapon, be the love”, and to dance off our rage against the chaotic end, however futile that might be.
Sleater-Kinney may have changed significantly, then, in sound and now in lineup, and if they manage a 10th record those changes will perhaps be even more pronounced; but their inimitable fury and drive is intact. A paean to survivors and those struggling to endure, The Center Won’t Hold shouts affirmation to all those listening, of course, but in particular to women: it’s not you, the songs seem to say – it’s Them.
Trust me,” Shannon Lay sings on “Sunday Sundown”, a soft yet forceful standout on her new album, August. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter repeats those two simple words one more time, prompting you to lean in and listen closely to what she’s about to tell you: “Love is hard to find, with ...
Trust me,” Shannon Lay sings on “Sunday Sundown”, a soft yet forceful standout on her new album, August. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter repeats those two simple words one more time, prompting you to lean in and listen closely to what she’s about to tell you: “Love is hard to find, with the shadows of your mind tellin’ you otherwise.” That’s a hard sentiment, but it derives so much of its power from that insistent set-up, as though she’s reached through the speaker and put a sympathetic hand on your shoulder. Lay uses similar techniques throughout August, peppering her songs with entreaties meant to make you pay special attention. On “Nowhere”, she turns syllables into sharp staccato jabs and sounds like she’s trying to call from across a crowded room. On the intense “Unconditional”, she cautions you, just on the cusp of outraged: “They’ll take all they want and they’ll give nothin’ back to you.” Then she punctuates it with an exhaled, not-quite-defeated, “It’s true.”
That trick makes Lay’s quiet songs sound loud and disruptive. Her melodies are pretty, her singing often beautiful, but August is never merely pretty and beautiful. Rather than inert or passive, her songs are active and lively, even a little prickly, from her deft finger-picking to her assertive vocal phrasing. The album strives to connect artist with audience, to speak directly to you, the individual listener. If she’s a confessional singer-songwriter, then she’s writing your confessions as well as her own. That makes her music both bracing and enticing, as she invites you into her world but doesn’t let you get too comfortable.
Fittingly, the title comes from an event that made Lay very uncomfortable. In August 2017, Lay quit her day job at a vintage store in Los Angeles called Squaresville and devoted herself fully to music. The experience was both fretful (would she be able to pay rent?) and freeing. Almost immediately she booked a tour opening for Kevin Morby, who thought so highly of her that he launched a special label imprint to release her album, Living Water, later that year. Since then she’s barely rested, balancing the demands of a solo career with her garage-punk band Feels and a touring gig in Ty Segall’s Freedom Band.
Lay recorded August with Segall at his LA home studio, emphasizing voice and guitar. She’s a precise instrumentalist who favours a finger-picked style that recalls Nick Drake or Paul Simon. You can hear her hands running along on the fretboard on “November”, which reinforces the song’s autumnal intimacy as well as its impression she’s aiming the song right at you. And her voice is gentle but steady, a bit like Sibylle Baier on “Shuffling Stoned”, insinuating the melody more than stating it outright. But there is something insistent in Lay’s phrasing, especially on “Past Time”, and her stoicism only makes her disdain for a self-involved someone so much more withering: “Tell me again about the things your mother made and how no-one did it better and no-one ever will,” she sings, her voice like an eye roll. “How I do love this time.”
To this foundation of voice and guitar she adds judicious flourishes that accentuate the songs without weighing them down. There’s emphatic percussion on “Wild”, droning violin and a locomotive snare on the title track, and a ramshackle indie-rock band on “Nowhere”, complete with keyboard solo and handclap rhythms. Mikal Cronin adds a fluttering sax to the stark opener “Death Up Close”, which adds breath and life to a song about their opposites. Many artists deploy that instrument for its dated associations, but there’s nothing ironic about Lay’s harrowing brush with mortality. Rather, it’s almost celebratory, as though our stories are more dramatic for having endings. When she sings three simple words at the end of the song – “I love you” – they have the weight of radical sincerity.
Perhaps Lay’s riskiest songwriting gambit is “The Dream”, on which she switches from acoustic to electric guitar, its notes sustained instead of short, each flowing into the other to create a cloudy, floating sensation. “It seems to me all a dream,” she sings, then repeats the phrase like a half-remembered mantra. Those are, in fact, the only words to the song, but Lay explores every fluttering facet of those syllables, as though trying to remember something her subconscious dredged up the night before. It’s a remarkable moment that closes an album that takes nothing for granted, that doesn’t consider your attention a gift, that wants to impart something profound to you. Trust her.
Bill Callahan has covered Silver Jews' “I Remember Me” in concert.
Pitchfork reports that the show took place New York’s Webster Hall during Callahan's current Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest tour
Callahan played “I Remember Me” as tribute to his friend and fellow Drag City artist, David Be...
Bill Callahan has covered Silver Jews’ “I Remember Me” in concert.
Pitchfork reports that the show took place New York’s Webster Hall during Callahan’s current Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest tour
Callahan played “I Remember Me” as tribute to his friend and fellow Drag City artist, David Berman, who died earlier this month aged 52.
“The world is and will always be a David Berman lyric,” Callahan wrote on Twitter after Berman’s death was announced. “I miss you so much, David.”
He’s the rocket man!
Elton: A Life In Pictures is a lavish 100 page tribute to pop’s most enduringly outrageous performer.
What a life – and what pictures!
The team behind Uncut’s long-running Ultimate Music Guides have brought their passion and expertise to this deluxe new product, which us...
He’s the rocket man!
Elton: A Life In Pictures is a lavish 100 page tribute to pop’s most enduringly outrageous performer.
What a life – and what pictures!
The team behind Uncut’s long-running Ultimate Music Guides have brought their passion and expertise to this deluxe new product, which uses classic and rare photographs to fully chronicle Elton’s extraordinary musical journey.
Electric boots and a mohair suit – we’ve got those and all the rest.
Bruce Springsteen has released a lyric video for his song, "I'll Stand By You".
The previously unreleased studio recording appears in the new film, Blinded By The Light - based on the memoir by former Uncut writer Saf Manzoor.
Springsteen reportedly originally wrote the song for his oldest son, Ev...
Bruce Springsteen has released a lyric video for his song, “I’ll Stand By You“.
The previously unreleased studio recording appears in the new film, Blinded By The Light – based on the memoir by former Uncut writer Saf Manzoor.
Springsteen reportedly originally wrote the song for his oldest son, Evan, between 1998 and 2001 after reading the Harry Potter books to his children.
According to Springsteen in a 2016 interview with BBC2, “I’ll Stand By You” is “a song that I wrote for my eldest son, it was a big ballad that was very uncharacteristic of something I’d sing myself. But it was something that I thought would have fit lovely.”
Kim Gordon is to release her first ever solo album on October 11 – watch the video for "Sketch Artist" below.
The Matador-released album, No Home Record, was recorded in Los Angeles, and features production work from Justin Raisen, primarily, alongside Shawn Everett and Jake Meginsky.
As well as...
Kim Gordon is to release her first ever solo album on October 11 – watch the video for “Sketch Artist” below.
The Matador-released album, No Home Record, was recorded in Los Angeles, and features production work from Justin Raisen, primarily, alongside Shawn Everett and Jake Meginsky.
As well as “Sketch Artist”, it features “Murdered Out”, originally released by Gordon as a single in 2016.
“‘Why a solo record? And why now?,’” says Gordon in a press release. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have happened without the persistence of Justin Raisen. Living in LA the last few years it feels like home, but the transience of the place makes it feel sometimes like no home.”
It seems that both guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown baulk at their music being described as blues; but it’s not because they have lofty pretensions or lack respect for the most elemental, culturally pliable and migratory of genres – they just see it as category error. Minor pentat...
It seems that both guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown baulk at their music being described as blues; but it’s not because they have lofty pretensions or lack respect for the most elemental, culturally pliable and migratory of genres – they just see it as category error. Minor pentatonic scales – common to the folk music of places as unalike as Bamako and Chongqing, Kilkenny and Kabul – are a key element of the New York duo’s intensely absorbing instrumentals, more familiar due to their migration to the Southern US states and reincarnation as what we call the blues. Chen’s time in Mauritania in 2013, where he studied guitar with master Jeiche Ould Chigaly, has clearly made its mark, too.
But however you label it, there’s no denying the ecstatic power of Brown’s deceptively simple, plywood-crate thwackings, bells and rattles, with Chen’s subtle but insistent manipulations of drones, open tunings and overtones, exercised in a seemingly infinite number of patterns and at frequently epic length. Wrangled over two full-length official LPs – 2015’s Wooden Bag and Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock from 2016 – theirs is a particular kind of elegant primitivism, both trippily transcendental and rooted to the earth in a truly profound way. Despite loose kinship with the likes of Sir Richard Bishop, Steve Gunn and Henry Flynt, 75DB are really out there on their own. Their sound hypnotises in much the same way as a car’s headlights fatally hypnotise a deer: the mesmerism is pure, neuro-physical reaction, not a choice.
On I Was Real (not a Zen koan but the misremembering of an old Motown song title, apparently) they shift ground significantly while cleaving to their core, in changes that are as much operational as conceptual. Most significantly, maybe, there are eight extra players in various combinations, including repeat collaborators Steve Maing (quarter-tone guitar), Sue Garner (guitarist/bassist and Brown’s wife) and saxophonist Cheryl Kingan.
The set runs at 79 minutes over nine tracks, was recorded over a four-year period and sees the pair cannibalising and/or reconfiguring earlier material for major studio in(ter)ventions. “C Or T (verso)” was “realised” by the pair – both reject the title of producer and the album credits deliberately omit any mention – using what Chen calls “spare parts” from the backwards intro to opener “Every Last Coffee Or Tea”, while “New New/The Worm/Like Laundry” is a suite of sorts, connecting several sections of the album in different keys with an extended chord change. And the intro of “WZN#3 (verso)” is a “ghost” of the outro – what remained when the original double guitar/bass part that several players overdubbed was removed. Which seems like both a wilfully awkward way of making a few minutes of new music and exactly the kind of thing that would please veteran explorers.
These studio techniques are quite a shift from 75DB’s usual unmediated sound, but the results are absolutely one with the set’s overall sensual delirium. The centrepiece is the title track – at 17 minutes comparatively short, given that live, it’s sometimes stretched out to 30 – and it’s a triumph of almost funereal drone featuring two super-subtle tonal shifts on Chen’s 12-string, the whole anchored by Brown’s nimble, polyrhythmic pulse.
Equally strong and dizzyingly pleasurable is “Every Last Coffee Or Tea”, which is from their 2013 self-released Cassette, but rearranged here for six players. It features a multiplicity of overlapping and heavily rhythmic, improv guitar, upright bass and amplified viola parts, plus a reassuringly thumping pulse – together, a masterclass in delayed gratification that conjures up a desert ceilidh. “Tetuzi Akiyama” (after the Japanese avant guitarist) is very different, with its unarguably bluesy, percussive stomp and hammered central riff leading what you’d swear was a dozen guitars, as is the uncharacteristically frantic “There’s No Such Thing As A King Bee”, an impromptu studio jam with hissing hi-hat.
The album’s closer is the terrific “WZN#3”, which is a reference to Chen’s time in Mauritania and has been played by more band permutations than any other 75DB piece. In tunings so open you can almost feel a breeze blow through, Chen’s and Maing’s guitars establish a thrillingly repetitive, seesaw dynamic whose relaxed feel belies the intuitive control needed to sustain it, twangling away as if in a trance and connecting West Africa to the Appalachians.
These are ageless, thrillingly energised devotionals for our secular and fast-moving times, full of euphonious noise and the dust kicked up by their deep-dug grooves. Somehow, 75 Dollar Bill push forward even while their music hovers in the eternal present.
A lot to recommend - not least the Michael Kiwanuka, Big Thief, Kacy & Clayton and Simon Joyner tracks. Plenty else besides. Should quickly mention we have a marvellous new issue out - Patti Smith on the cover - which you can buy in the shops or direct from our friends here. Free P&P, I shou...
A lot to recommend – not least the Michael Kiwanuka, Big Thief, Kacy & Clayton and Simon Joyner tracks. Plenty else besides. Should quickly mention we have a marvellous new issue out – Patti Smith on the cover – which you can buy in the shops or direct from our friends here. Free P&P, I should mention, too.
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In memory of Peter Fonda, who died on August 16, 2019; this was originally published in Uncut's January 2002 issue (Take 52)
RETURN OF THE WILD ANGEL
Two years after he became a counterculture star with Easy R...
In memory of Peter Fonda, who died on August 16, 2019; this was originally published in Uncut’s January 2002 issue (Take 52)
RETURN OF THE WILD ANGEL
Two years after he became a counterculture star with Easy Rider, PETER FONDA made his directorial debut with a lyrical western, THE HIRED HAND, as a newly restored version opens in the UK this month, he talks to Damien Love
Synchronicity they call it. Shortly before I’m due to speak with Peter Fonda, I flick on the TV, and there’s his father, Henry – “Hollywood’s statue of liberty,” to borrow David Thomson’s phrase – standing in a black-and-white hotel corridor, speaking with a gathering of Runyonesque Times Square natives, that unmistakable voice kept low, a sound as gentle as a warm breeze, but carrying echoes of broken glass.
His children inherited traces of that cadence along with their bone structure. It’s still there, faintly, when I ask the 61-year-old Peter Fonda how he’s doing, and he says, “I’m pretty good. I’m alive. People think I’m cynical when I say that, but it’s the only way to start the day. And the best way to finish it.”
The film on my TV is an almost-forgotten thing called The Big Street, released late in 1942, when Peter Fonda was just shy of his third birthday, just before his father would disappear from the house and go off to fight a war.
Fonda remembers the movie. He remembers going to watch his father’s films in movie theatres back then as a little kid. Seeing his dad up on cinema screens during that period, in films about cowboys and circuses and rum doings in New York City, the boy would get confused. His dad was supposed to be away fighting the Japanese, after all. Eventually, he decided the man on the movie screen wasn’t his dad at all. He just looked like him. Then he’d get freaked out when his dad came home on leave, because he didn’t look like his dad – he looked like the man from the movies.
This was the earliest manifestation of an awkward distance between father and son which, as anyone familiar with his consistently entertaining memoir Don’t Tell Dad will be aware, would come to be a defining characteristic in their relationship, and which the younger Fonda spent many years breaking down.
In The Big Street, anyway, the man who looks like Henry Fonda plays a decent, lovelorn busboy who pushes a bitter, semi-crazy Lucille Ball in a wheelchair from Manhattan to Miami. What really strikes me as I watch a few scenes on TV, though, is that it also features Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, both members of the Mercury Theatre stock company Orson Welles brought to Hollywood, and that it was made when members of Welles’ contingent were being given a particularly rough ride.
Seen as East Coast longhairs, an invading bohemian force come to overthrow the system, there had been not-so-private jubilation among sectors of the Hollywood establishment when Citizen Kane (1941) stiffed at the box-office. Taken from him and recut, Welles’s second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was given only a desultory release by a studio that didn’t care about it, buried. Just off of that film, with their Mercury unit shut down by the RKO studio, as they talk with Henry Fonda in The Big Street, Moorehead and Collins are beaten refugee fighters from a failed revolution.
Twenty-seven years would pass before Hollywood had to deal with another longhair revolution. When it came, it was an attack from within, prodigal sons coming home to kill their elders. Peter Fonda – the Statue of Liberty’s kid, goddamn it – and Dennis Hopper, the ungrateful little punk who’d married Margaret Sullavan’s daughter and been a long-term houseguest of David O Selznick and Jennifer Jones, made this foul hippy thing called Easy Rider…
But you know all about that. How the film was no Citizen Kane, but became a box office sensation in a way Welles’ movie never did. How Peter Fonda’s Captain America seemed to represent something for a generation the same way that, out along different highways, his father’s Tom Joad once had for a generation before. How it made back its $400,000 budget 100 times over. And how, even if they didn’t get the dirt, the drugs, the hair and the music, studio chiefs understood those numbers and scrambled in fright to mine this incomprehensible new “youth market”.
Neil Young has announced that his new album with Crazy Horse is called Colorado, and that it's due for release in October.
It will be preceded later this month by the single "Rainbow Of Colors", which was premiered at the Crazy Horse shows earlier this year.
Order the latest issue of Uncut online...
Neil Young has announced that his new album with Crazy Horse is called Colorado, and that it’s due for release in October.
“10 new songs ranging from around 3 minutes to over 13 minutes, will be coming your way,” writes Young on Neil Young Archives. “We hope you love this new album as much as we do.
Colorado will be released on double vinyl (three sides plus a 7” exclusive two-sided single not on the album) as well as CD and digital formats.
In addition, a film documenting the making of of Colorado – entitled Mountaintop Sessions and directed by CK Vollick – will be screened in over 100 cinemas worldwide in the week of the album’s release. “It is a wild one folks, no holds barred,” writes Young. “You will see the whole process just as it went down! I don’t think a film about this subject with the openness and intensity we have captured has ever been seen.”
Bruce Springsteen has unveiled details of his Western Stars film, coming to select cinemas this autumn following a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
Springsteen co-directed the film (alongside longtime collaborator Thom Zimny). It features him performing all 13 songs on the ...
Bruce Springsteen has unveiled details of his Western Stars film, coming to select cinemas this autumn following a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
Springsteen co-directed the film (alongside longtime collaborator Thom Zimny). It features him performing all 13 songs on the album, backed up by a band and a full orchestra, under the cathedral ceiling of his historic nearly-100-year-old barn.
Seeing Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood the other night reminded me to dust down this interview I did with the director many moons ago. It first ran in Melody Maker -I'm guessing it was done around the time of Pulp Fiction, so 1994 - and then again in the first issue of Uncut.
A...
Seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood the other night reminded me to dust down this interview I did with the director many moons ago. It first ran in Melody Maker -I’m guessing it was done around the time of Pulp Fiction, so 1994 – and then again in the first issue of Uncut.
Anyway, here you go: Quentin Tarantino on his 10 favourite records.
Bob Dylan
Blood On The Tracks
“This is my favourite album ever. I spent the end of my teenage years and my early twenties listening to old music – rockabilly music, stuff like that. Then I discovered folk music when I was 25, and that led me to Dylan. He totally blew me away with this. It’s like the great album from the second period, y’know? He did that first run of albums in the Sixties, then he started doing his less troublesome albums – and out of that comes Blood On The Tracks. It’s his masterpiece.
Bob Dylan
“Tangled Up In Blue”
“OK, maybe I’m cheating here. I know this is off Blood On The Tracks, but it’s my all-time favourite song. It’s one of those songs where the lyrics are ambiguous you can actually write the song yourself. That’s a lot of fun – it’s like Dylan fooling around with the listener, playing on the way he or she interprets the lyrics. “It’s very hard to take individual songs off Blood On the Tracks, because itworks so well as an entire album. I used to think ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ was a more powerful song than ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ but, over the years I’ve kinda realized ‘Tangled…’ has the edge, just for the fun you can have with it.’
Freda Payne
“Band Of Gold”
“I’m a gigantic music fan. I love fifties rock‘n’roll, Chess, Sun, Motown. All the Merseybeat bands, Sixties girl groups, folk. This is just so cool: it’s a combination of the way it’s produced, the cool pop/R&B sound, and Freda’s voice. Its kinda kitschy in a way – y’know, it’s got a really up-tempo tune – and, the first few times I heard it, I was, like, totally into the coolness of the song. It was only on the third or fourth listen I realised the lyrics were so fucking heartbreaking.”
Elvis Presley
The Sun Sessions
“This has been a hugely important album to me. I was always a big rockability fan and a big Elvis fan, and to me this album is the purest expression of Elvis there was. Sure, there are better individual songs – but no one collection ever touched the album. When I was young, I used to think Elvis was the voice of truth. I don’t know what that means, but his voice… shit man, it sounded so fucking pure. If you grew up loving Elvis, this is it. Forget the Vegas period: if you really love Elvis, you’re ashamed of that man in Vegas. You feel like he let you down. The hillbilly cat never let you down.”
Phil Ochs
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore”
“OK, from now on these aren’t in any order. It’s the same with movies: I have my three favourite – Taxi Driver, Blow Out and Rio Bravo – and after that it depends on my mood. This is one of my favourite protest/folk albums. While Dylan was a poet Ochs was a musical journalist: He was a chronicler of his time, filled with humour and compassion. He’d write songs which would seem very black and white, and then , in the last verse, he’d say something which, like, completely shattered you. A song I love very much on this album is ‘Here’s To The State of Mississippi’ – Basically, it’s everything the movie Mississippi Burning should have been.”
Phil Ochs
“The Highwayman”
“I’m cheating again. This is an Alfred Noyes poem, which Ochs arranged for music. The vocal has made me burst into tears more times than I care to remember.”
Elmer Bernstein
The Great Escape
“I used to have a huge collection of film soundtracks. I don’t get enthusiastic about them any more, though, because now most soundtracks are just a collection of rock songs, half of which don’t even appear in the movie. This is a real classic. It has a great min theme which brings the movie right into your head. All the tracks hold up – it’s so damn effective. It took me ages to get hold of a copy, and, Jeez, I almost wept when I finally did.”
Bernard Herrmann
Sisters
“This is from a Brian De Palma movie. It’s a pretty scary film, and the soundtrack… ok if you want to freak yourself out, turn out all the lights and sit in the middle of the room and listen to this. You won’t last a minute. When I’m first thinking about a movie I’ll start looking for songs that reflect the personality of the movie, I’ll start looking for songs which can reflect the personality of the movie. The record I think most about is the one which plays during the opening credits, because that’s the one which sets the tone of the movie. Like in Reservoir Dogs, when you see the guys all walking out of the diner, and that bass line from ‘Little Green Bag’ kicks in – you just know there’s gonna be trouble.”
Jerry Goldsmith
Under Fire
“‘The Main Theme’ is one of the greatest pieces of music written for a movie. It’s so haunting, so beautiful, – full of pan flutes and stuff. It’s shattering y’know – like a Morricone theme. Oddly enough, ‘The Main Theme’ works really well, but they never play it over the opening credits. They play it over the middle and during the closing credits, which is very strange.”
Jack Nitzsche
Revenge
“Out of all the soundtracks, this is the best. It’s from a Tony Scott movie – he directed True Romance – and it’s a very lush, elegant score. You don’t need to know the film to enjoy the soundtrack: It works in its own right.”
